Author: writing1to6

I taught in Reception yesterday – writing a four-word sentence, one idea, all words decodable using satpni, repetition using a writing frame…. And at the other end of the spectrum is this – writing in a literary style, using adverbials to add nuance. I can’t say that I have a preference for teaching writing in a particular phase, but I enjoy the sense that the one approach (in Reception) is building to the other. It seems distant when working with Reception children, but from the beginning, even when writing short, repetitive sentences with a controlled vocabulary, we can give them a sense of what a sentence is, the conventions for showing how they start and finish, and how they, the writer, can control them.

Writing in this distinctly literary register is of course not the only outcome we are looking for. (And by ‘we’ I mean professionals who want to teach children how to write well, not some ever-changing end of primary-age outcome). We want children to be confident in all registers. The narrative prose of, say, Malorie Blackman, as well as the different kinds of non-fiction writing. But I do think there is a particular value in exposure to and writing of literary texts. And I believe, having seen proof of it over years of intervention with struggling pupils, that every child can write them.

Texts written in this style provide access to a world that only exists when words are put together according to its rules. It’s unfortunate that the current iteration of the curriculum insists on the teaching of ‘fronted adverbials’ and in doing so has created mockery and resistance within the profession to something that is useful and important.

For this resource, I’ve selected four sentences from the text that include adverbials starting with an adjective (or adjectives, or modified adjectives). I’ve structured it so that the position of the adverbial can be either fronted, embedded or after the main idea – children can see it in all three positions and decide which works best.

The resource continues with a selection of sentences with adverbials starting with adjectives, again in the three different positions. They are all taken from texts written in a more or less literary style. As ever, the resource is fully-editable so that you can pick and change as you wish.

I’ve drawn on texts some of which are out of print. But if you are lucky enough to work in an institution that will let you get hold of them, or you want to buy them for yourself, I would urge you to do so – they have endless uses as well as being works of art.

The Power of Reading unit for this text has a (very) long list of perhaps nebulously connected books that they suggest you draw upon. One of them is another book by Carol Ann Duffy, ‘The Tear Thief’. It reminds me of ‘Jinnie Ghost’ by Jane Ray (illustrator of ‘The Lost Happy Endings’) as well as ‘The Lost Happy Endings’ itself. They all have mysterious, magical interventions at children’s bedtime. Jub and the Tear Thief carry sacks with almost-numinous contents. The Tear Thief and Jinnie Ghost are not human, and they travel in and out of houses along an urban street visiting different children. The moon plays a central part in ‘The Tear Thief’ and is integral to the appearance of ‘The Lost Happy Endings’ and ‘Jinnie Ghost’.

However, ‘The Tear Thief’ lacks the narrative and stylistic cohesion of ‘The Lost Happy Endings’ and ‘Jinnie Ghost’. The writing style is not consistent. I think Carol Ann Duffy was aiming for more of a story-teller register, sounding closer to speech, but she frequently lapses into a literary style along the way. The way the story is structured is also problematic: somehow we don’t know if the Tear Thief has good or bad intentions at the beginning; and when the mother says to her son, ‘Stop crying or the Tear Thief will hear you’, we don’t know if the thief is some kind of bogeyman or not. We don’t find out soon enough why she is collecting the children’s tears. In ‘Jinnie Ghost’, in contrast, we discover very soon that the ghost is easing the difficulties that children encounter in their dreams, and this is continued consistently until the end in a lyrical but still relatively-sparse style.

Then we have a very weak problem – a little girl has lost her dog – when none was really needed. It would have worked better if the focus had been on the way that the Tear Thief uses the children’s tears to create the moon’s beauty. On the last page there is an attempt to pull these elements together – the moonlight, the found dog, a baby crying – all in a full-blown literary style. The beautiful writing does not compensate for the stylistic and narrative problems. I wonder if a Year 6 class could notice this?

The resource here focuses on the work of the illustrator P J Lynch. It starts with a couple of links to websites with information about him, but the bulk of the presentation is a comparison of his illustrations in two books – East of the Sun West of the Moon and Mysterious Traveller. For those following the Power of Reading unit, this relates to Sessions 1, 4 and 6. For anyone else, the resources is, as ever, fully-editable to suit your needs.

The comparison is between illustrations for stories with two contrasting settings, the first book being set in Norway, the second in Mali. I’ve started the exercise of comparison with slides showing the geographical location of these two countries as well as their climates. P J Lynch does a great job conveying the two contrasting climates in his beautiful and impressive landscapes.

The presentation then proceeds with a variety of ways of comparing the illustrations in the two books. The first is a comparison of photos of the landscapes of the two countries (yellow backgrounds for Mali, blue for Norway) which can be closely related to the stories. The next two slides (peach-coloured) provide a starting-point for a comparison of the style and effect of the illustrations in the two books. The last two slides (pale green) give suggestions for comparing in terms of both similarities and differences.

(Another book illustrated by P J Lynch, published in 1985 – found in a charity shop while I was working on this post…)

I started writing this post after reading Tom Bennett’s 2015 mostly sceptical article Group Work for the Good that he recently linked to on Twitter. I tweeted back to him that I had only the week before decided that group work would be my way forward in raising attainment with a Year 3 class that I teach every week. (His reply? – ‘Careful now ;)’!)

Bennett’s justifiable reservations notwithstanding, I’ve found group work to be an effective teaching tool, specifically in raising attainment by changing learning behaviour.

The class in question is not my class but I’ve taught them every week since January this year. In that time, the same children have behaved more or less every week in the same way, leading to the same failure to achieve the outcome of the lesson.

I won’t be talking about behaviour management at a class or school level; nor how SEND provision, including parental engagement, might help these children’s attainment. Though in real life it is false to make this separation, this post will focus only on the idea of using group work to achieve successful outcomes for the whole class.

My experience

I should start, as Bennett did, by talking about experience as a factor in using group work. I’ve been teaching Key Stages 1 and 2 for about 15 years, much of it doing interventions – with EAL pupils and with low, medium and high attainers. I was Literacy Co-ordinator for five years. I’ve been a supply teacher and at the moment I’m a PPA teacher. I’ve done team teaching and whole class teaching using a variety of methods, including ‘fully guided instruction’ as Bennett puts it, and group work. Group work is certainly not the only answer to low attainment. Whatever the context or approach, I’m looking for a) task completion to b) a standard that indicates attainment, leading to c) progress.

And that’s what I’m not seeing from the children I’ve mentioned, who make up about a quarter of the class. I’m getting some of a) but without b), but mostly neither a) nor b), which clearly leads to a dearth of c).

My concern is not just for the lack of progress in this numerically-significant group of children. It’s the knock-on for the rest of the class: the messing around, chatting, irritability and distress that causes stress and lowers attainment for everyone.

That’s not to say that some of those whose attainment is fine are models of good learning behaviour. There will always be children who can mess around, chat, get bad-tempered or cry and still manage to achieve a), b) & c). But they could probably achieve more with improved learning behaviour, just as much as their classmates attaining at a lower level could.

So, how?

Below are the strategies I built into planning to pre-empt the drawbacks that Bennett identifies in his article, namely unequal participation because some children are coasting or not doing anything.

Grouping

I started by grouping the children not just by their usual attainment but by the learning behaviours that I’ve observed over the last 10 months.

This is where it gets quite unscientific. There are seven groups of four, as follows:

Group 1: These children always listen attentively during whole class teaching, have good recall and good working memories, can manage complex tasks, retaining a sequence of instructions from beginning to end, co-operate, don’t complain, manage their problems – personal and social – appropriately, always complete their tasks to the desired standard.

Group 2: These children’s attainment is always good, but this is in spite of often chatting and messing around, arguing, getting upset with other children and complaining – all learning behaviour that means their attainment is very likely not as good as it should be, and which affects other children too.

Group 3: This is a group of children with low self-esteem as learners. In one case it is catastrophic, with frequent outbursts of anger and crying. There is active avoidance in every lesson – asking to get water, to go to the toilet, complaints about headaches etc., as well of off-task behaviour – chatting, day-dreaming, simply doing nothing. Co-operation is often poor because the children are not sure that they are esteemed or even liked, and attainment is consistently low.

Group 4: This group of children works really slowly. Most of them lack confidence. Most of them have poor attention during whole class teaching. For one of them there is usually an episode of crying which ends up with an inability to complete tasks unless an adult intervenes and supports.

Group 5: The attainment of the members of this group of children is usually okay. They’re fidgety, they call out and chat, they’re noisy when they work, one of them tends to get really upset about some aspect of sharing or fairness, but they do usually get there with a firm hand.

Group 6: The members of this group usually don’t complete the task, plus there are usually conceptual errors in the work that they do produce. They’re diligent but don’t follow whole-class input and/or don’t retain it between the teaching and the task.

Group 7: This group are similar to group 6 but, in the case of three out of the four children, without the diligence. They probably have difficulties with processing and retaining information. They often get distracted by things outside of learning – i.e. what other children are doing – and have difficulty co-operating.

The idea of grouping by learning behaviour is that children are not compensating for each other’s weaknesses. They can see what is it that impedes their own learning in the behaviour of the other children in the group. If the teacher is explicit, as I am, about what those learning behaviours are, they can support each other in overcoming them. This brings me on to the next strategy.

Teacher’s role

The teacher’s role here is to comment on learning behaviours rather than task. The teacher reflects back to children the learning behaviours as problems that need to be solved. I describe behaviours repetitively and over-praise any shift away from them. Children can ask the teacher questions related to subject knowledge and the task, but are encouraged to seek solutions from each other rather than from the teacher. I will allow more leeway with children that have difficulties managing cognitive load, for example by repeating key words, putting key words into sentences for them to repeat etc.

For this, cognitive load needs to be carefully managed, which leads to the next point.

Modelling the outcome

In this week’s lesson, each group’s task was to produce a poster. The poster had three sections: the first involved a map, the second a diagram and the third a piece of writing – a high cognitive load. I made a poster with these three sections so that the children knew what the outcome should look like and contain. I went over the content and skills for each section, relating it to learning from previous lessons as well as new learning, I turned the poster over after introducing it so that children could not just copy it, but allowed groups that needed to to look at it again if they asked. I made explicit which parts of the poster were based on previous knowledge and which required application of knowledge taught in that lesson – the next point.

Layering knowledge and skills

I wouldn’t use group work when teaching only new material. If children are able to apply knowledge they already have, each child should be able to contribute something. The knowledge that children had to apply was layered as follows:

Previously taught and revisited over several lessons, so fairly embedded: in this case, five countries, their names, their place on the world map and their continents

Recently-taught, still needing to be revisited: tectonic plates – what they are in terms of the structure of the Earth

New, taught for the first time in that lesson: the risk of earthquakes in different parts of the world (information to be read from a map showing this) and how earthquakes happen in relation to the different types of plate movement (information to be gleaned from a video).

Children had to make a contribution in all of these areas of knowledge. This was ensured by the next strategy.

Rotation of roles

The poster was planned to have three sections so that each child could spend an allocated amount of time (in this case, ten minutes) on each one. Children could check information or ideas with other members of the group, but as long as the ten minutes lasted it was their responsibility to work on one section. The fourth role was ‘observer’, the child who observed learning behaviours while the other children worked on the poster. Whenever children made a written or drawn contribution to the poster, they had to write their name against it, making shirking visible.

Immediate feedback

Bennett finds group assessment unfair. But if feedback is about the learning behaviour that every member of the group demonstrates then it can be useful for the individual members of the group. With something as large and visual as a poster, it is possible to bring the class back together as a whole and make comments about each poster in terms of how much of the task has been achieved by each group. This has the added benefit of making task completion a group responsibility, with shortcomings being shared between members of the group, rather than felt on an individual level, which for some children has already become an ingrained and difficult part of the learning experience.

I made a start on this this week. I was able to deliver the lesson so that there was a play time separating ‘how to do this poster’ and ‘the video containing the new information you need to complete this poster’, which was important considering the high cognitive load. Outcomes in the next post….

The resource here is for using with ‘East of the Sun West of the Moon’. It is intended for a Year 6 class, though a comparison with an un-alike text is not explicitly suggested in the Power of Reading unit. The story the resource is based on, ‘The Golden Bracelet’, has similarities with the Norwegian story but it is mostly the differences that underline and draw out the fairy tale features.

It is a US picture book set in ancient Armenia and based on a story written down in the 19th century by Ghazaros Aghayan, an Armenian writer. I was trying to think of Lost Husband stories and kept coming back to this one. The thing is, though there is a lost husband, the story as told here is not a fairy tale. It can be found in an Aghayan collection called ‘Fables and Fairy Tales’ and it tells more like a fable in this version by David Kherdian.

The story has been animated (in Armenian) recently, and from the clips online it seems that there is a lot more magic in it than in the Kherdian version. However, I’m going with the Kherdian book as a down-to-earth comparison with ‘East of the Sun West of the Moon’.

A still from a 2014 animation of The Golden Bracelet story, ‘Anahit’

The picture at the top of this post illustrates very well the difference between Anahit and the lassie of ‘East of the Sun West of the Moon’: Anahit is a queen with practical tools at her disposal. The point of ‘The Golden Bracelet’ is that Anahit values practical action above all, and it is this that saves the day.

There are lots of different ways to approach a compare/contrast exercise. Click here for mine, which sets the magical against the realistic.

P.S. Anahit gets the ‘Rejected Princesses’ ( or Women too Awesome, Awful, or Offbeat for Kids’ Movies) treatment here, with the sub-heading ‘The Queen Who Made the King Get a Job’. It also has a link to the entire animated film.

East of the Sun West of the Moon tale is categorised by the Aarne-Thompson index as a ‘Lost Husband’ type, which can be useful to know when approaching Session 9 in the Power of Reading sequence. It suggests comparing different versions of the story and this great blog, fairytalez.com, has a wealth of information for teachers.

I’ve copied (and slightly edited) the list of features of the ‘Lost Husband’ type of tale, and then copied the list of similar stories (again, slightly edited) from fairytalez.com:

The fairy tales typically feature an enchanted man who has become an animal

A daughter is required to or is asked to marry the “beast”

The husband may appear to be a man at night or when he gets to his home

Once at the castle or beast’s home, the bride is treated lavishly but is homesick

The bride may go home to her family, but is told to not stay beyond a certain number of days

The heroine goes on the quest for her husband after he disappears

The bride may receive magical objects to help her return home as well as assist in her quest for the husband

The fairy tale or folk tale may feature an appearance by the winds, sun or moon

The enchantment over the husband is broken when the bride finds him or performs certain tasks

The Enchanted Pig is a Romanian fairy tale about a king’s daughter who is fated to marry a “pig from the North.” She doesn’t want to, however, her father convinces her the pig must be under a magic spell, and she agrees, then heads to his castle to be his bride…

In the Italian fairy tale The Enchanted Snake, a snake is raised by a woman who longs for a child. After the snake grows up, he wishes to marry a princess. The story was authored by Giambattista Basile for his collection The Pentamerone…

A Sprig of Rosemary is … unusual compared to other stories that are type 425A, because the husband is a magician who can change his shape; his animal form isn’t the result of an enchantment.

The Brown Bear of Norway is an Irish fairy tale originally published by author Patrick Kennedy in 1866. The story was later collected by Andrew Lang, who shared it in The Lilac Fairy Book.

A bear or beast isn’t the only enchanted form that the prince may have in these types of fairy tales. In The Tale of the Hoodie by John Francis Campbell, the prince is a hoodie, also known as a hooded crow. The fairy tale … features a twist from other type 425A fairy tales, as the bride is allowed to choose whether the crow will be a man by day or by night.

Like in East of the Sun and West of the Moon, here the husband is a giant animal upon which the bride can ride…The Black Bull of Norroway features a large bull who gets separated from his bride when she is left in a valley of glass…

White-Bear-King-Valemon or King Valemon, The White Bear comes to us from the Tales of the Fjeld: A Second Series of Popular Tales from the Norse. This fairy tale has traces of East of the Sun, West of the Moon …

The Daughter of the Skies by J.F. Campbell … comes from Scotland. This folk tale features the husband as a dog, however, he goes to the skies, so the author notes he may be a “Gaelic deity.”

I’ve made a table comparing features of five of the fairy tales. The criteria for comparison are quite comprehensive and it’s up to you how many you wish pupils to examine. I’m imagining that you could give one tale to a group of six for reading and analysing (perhaps working in mixed pairs), with a version of the table for them to complete, as many boxes as you think they can manage. You could make the first row empty, for them to fill in the information for East of the Sun West of the Moon.

Once each tale has been analysed by a group using the same format, you can collate them into a class table, for children can then use to look for patterns, similarities, differences etc. You can of course ask children which is their favourite – which means making sure that they know all the tales.

The tales themselves vary in word count, so I’ve done abridged versions of each to make them similar in terms of length and demand: you should be able to literally print them off and distribute without making any changes, though as ever they are in Word format should you wish to edit. You can use these abridged versions for the analysis stage, and for reading them to the class yourself.

If I was doing this session with a class, I wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to ask them to think about what the symbolism in each tale might be. My experience with children is that they become very engaged, attentive and thoughtful when working at this sort of depth, and are more than capable of coming up with ideas that surprise and impress us. This can be particularly the case with children whose decoding in reading is at a lower level than others, but whose understanding of human matters might be deeper.

At the same time, it might be useful to give the class some ideas as starting points – such as, ‘the sun shines during the day, the moon at night, but the wind can blow during the day and at night – what could this symbolise in the story?’ Another suggestion is that the children could highlight with highlighter pens the things in the stories that might be symbolic of something – such as the chicken bones in The Enchanted Pig – so that they can discuss some ideas with partners or in groups before a class discussion.

The Ell-Nosed Princess, from P J Lynch’s illustrations for East of the Sun West of the Moon

The Power of Reading sequence for East of the Sun West of the Moon treats it to some extent like it does its other literary texts. For example, it asks the class to examine the characters of the protagonists (Session 3), with a focus on the portrayal of the heroine (Session 5).

But of course – as the sequence acknowledges – fairy tales ‘preserve key features of an oral storytelling tradition’ and are quite different from literary texts in important ways.

The literary writer spends 80,000—90,000—100,000 words to get the reader to see, hear and feel what the author wants the reader to sense and understand. Characters need to be developed: have names, have clear motives, and follow long, logical, exciting, interesting progressions. The reader is allowed into the heads of the characters and experiences the progressions with them. Fairy tales are short, compact, and sketchy on details. We never get inside the hero or heroine’s head; we may not even know their names. We see them on the surface. Motivations and logic are optional…

…If we are to measure the fairy tale as an artistic form—not that it cares—we would do better to use the terms we use to describe paintings. What are the images? What does it say to us? What is the atmosphere of the work? What memories does it evoke? What is the impression it leaves behind?

The sequence goes some way to acknowledging this by suggesting a focus on ‘how elements of northern folk tales are conveyed through pictures and language’ in Session 4: Looking closely at pictures. In the notes for this session it directs the teacher and class to ‘note what the pictures show that the words don’t’.

However, this isn’t quite the point that the quotation above is making: for the reader to respond with feeling to the story, rather than to the pictures that go with the story. In this case, would the writing of a poem be the best way for a class to end this unit?

It is worth saying that the sequence does not explicitly build towards a final piece of writing. The last session, Session 10, is called ‘Devising a quest story’ and suggests that any plans devised ‘could be continued as piece of extended writing’. This seems to be an implicit acknowledgment that the real power of fairy tales is in the reading of them rather than the writing.

Whether you choose to end the sequence with the writing of a poem or a fairy tale, it is an opportunity to introduce pupils to the idea that characters, both animal and human, can represent human qualities and fates. As Nikki Gamble says in her chapter on Traditional Tales and Fairy Tales in ‘Exploring Children’s Literature’:

..characters in folk tales are archetypal, representing ideas rather than attempts at realistic characteristics.

You can use the PowerPoint here to demonstrate this as a starting point for writing a poem or a retelling along these lines. Before using it, Year 6 children and even more so Year 5, will need parallel input on symbols and symbolism.

I used this essay by a Jungian psychologist Dr Stephen A Martin for this PowerPoint (which is copyrighted).

Sessions 11 to 13 suggest that children design and describe an outfit for inclusion in Halibut Jackson’s shop. I have to admit I haven’t actually tried this with a Year 1 or Year 2 class – but here’s how I would approach it.

Session 11 suggests using Halibut’s shop at the end of the story as the starting point. However, I think there’s nothing lost and a lot gained by using the picture children will know from Session 9 – the double page spread with the text ‘Everybody noticed Halibut Jackson’.

Not only is there more to look at in terms of numbers of outfit, it’s also a way of capitalising on one of the real strengths of the book, namely the depiction of both male and female clothing from a range of times and cultures. The PowerPoint shows eight of these outfits. Each slide is labelled with key vocabulary and a short bit of writing following the PoR suggestions: what is the item made of, who might wear it, where might they wear it, how would it make them feel wearing it, and what might the reaction to the outfit be?

The text follows a formula which children may but don’t have to adopt in their own writing. Each slide has the same sentence structure and order of ideas, but don’t expect or require children to repeat it. Let them take in what they can and reproduce – or surpass! – as they are able.

At the end of the PowerPoint is a template which you could use or adapt for the children to design their own outfits.